What a great week!!!! Each student in 5W should be very proud of their achievement. They have worked extremely hard to acquire new learning, make new connections and to think and take concrete action on their chosen inquiries. Our focus now is to reflect on our achievements, challenges and action goals for the near future.

Thank you so much to all of our wonderful 5W parents for your help in supporting your child through the whole process and all of the 5W students at their Exhibition night.

Please enjoy some of the photos below. There are photos of 5W students both before they started and after – can you guess which ones are which!!

Today we looked for our most important, BIGGEST, most open/thick questions that we had or have for our Exhibition. The idea is that we want to direct our audience(s) next week to talk with us / ask us about the information we understand and have knowledge about and evidence for.

Below are some photos of us working with the Grade 10 students who were excellent today as invaluable buddies. Thank you to Mr Mejia for bringing all the students across to work with us for 30 minutes today.

Making stuff – interactive materials/posters/slide shows/audio/video/Art/etc
What will our HOOK be?
Printing things out
Asking more questions as we think of them
Answering the questions that we have already thought of
Taking and editing video
Interviewing experts

The ART room is open at 07:45 everyday for students to (respectfully) use it – please clean up before you leave.

Having decided on our issue, the group we will be working in/with and some main inquiries into our issue, we have moved on to starting to develop initial questions that we would like to find answers to.

Conversations at home will no doubt be of great help to your child in developing his/her understanding of their Exhibition issue. For example:

Paper Towel use at YIS. Inspired by Joe Smith.
Issue – a waste of paper and money.
Group: Environment
Main idea: Is the use of paper towels the most environmentally friendly way of drying our hands?

Inquiries into:

the cost of using paper towels
the alternative ways we could dry our hands
the best ways to teach and encourage other members of our community to help us save money, energy and TREES!

We shall be looking at a question each day in class as your child moves into his or her final days of independent research and presentation preparation. Any conversations or field trips you can have (or do) with your child at home will no doubt be immensely helpful.

If someone comes to talk with your child at his/her Exhibition in the Auditorium, could s/he talk about the following and provide evidence?

What is your subject about?
How does (what you have been interested in) work? How do you explain it?
Why is (what you have been interested in) the way it is now?
What is (what you have been interested in) connected with/to ?
How has (what you have been interested in) changed over the years?
What are other people’s points of view with (what you have been interested in) ?
How do you know about (what you have been interested in) and what do you think about it all?
What have you DONE about it all or what are you planning to do (action) about (what you have been interested in) ?

Having decided upon the BIG IMPORTANT idea that your child wants to focus on for his or her Exhibition, the next stage for us is to start building up QUESTIONS that your child wants to try and answer. We modelled in class what questions could look like for an example Exhibition of ‘skin cancer’ with Mr. Weekes HERE

We have discussed these questions and categorised them in to ‘open/thick’ questions and ‘closed/thin’ questions. This is NOT the end of thinking of questions! In fact it’s just the beginning! More questions (and often better questions) will flow as you start to inquire into your issue/idea.

NOW – it’s 5W students’ turn. 5W students have started writing their own questions in their Exhibition journal books.

PARENTS – please HELP your child by discussing their questions and suggesting any that might come to mind.

5W students – please add all your current questions to your own GDoc > Bitly link and SHARE below in the comments section. You will find your own question document in Google Classroom assignments. Make sure you share your document with ‘anyone on the web’ before you Bitly link it!